Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, Portsmouth; June 7, 1944: “The
landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory
foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time
and place was based on the best information available. The troops, the air
and navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or
fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.”
The communiqué was written just before D-Day by General Dwight D. Eisenhower,
the Supreme Commander Allied Expeditionary Force. Besides telling us much
about the man who would become the 34th President of the United States — he
drafted it without any “finessing” by his staff; indeed, they did not know
that he was writing it — it tells us just what the stakes were in that first
week of June 1944. Unlike any other military operation that century, the
strategy of the war turned on a single day’s fighting. For if the
“satisfactory foothold” were not gained by nightfall — by the 175,000 men
who would land in two waves — it would not be gained at all.
D-Day was, therefore, a separate battle within the campaign for the liberation
of France and a most desperate one. Eisenhower understood this, as did most
British commanders: the British had been fighting long enough to know that
the Germans would oppose the landings tenaciously and counter-attack
vigorously. They knew the technical perils of an assault landing across the
English Channel too. The terrible debacle of the Dieppe raid in 1942 had
taught them. Antony Beevor quotes one American officer as saying that the
British had a fear of failure as a consequence of Dunkirk, Dieppe and all
the other bloody noses of four years’ fighting.
US commanders were perhaps not as apprehensive, although they understood well
enough that the casualties would be heavy. There were some ambitious
objectives set for the troops on the first day and, although as night fell
Eisenhower was able to tear up his contingency message and release an upbeat
one, the progress inland was nothing like as good as General Bernard
Montgomery, the ground commander, had intended. For while the British and
Canadian divisions had a slightly easier time of the fighting on the beaches
than they had feared, in their surprise to be alive they were perhaps a
little slow to exploit their luck. On the other hand, the Americans had a
far worse time getting ashore than they had imagined, on Omaha beach
especially. Contrary to general expectations, therefore, if for different
reasons, the British and Americans would find it harder getting out of
Normandy than getting in.
The best way to come to this book would be by way of Andrew Roberts’s Masters
and Commanders, published last year, which tells the story of how the
landings came about — how after the Americans entered the war in December
1941 President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, with their respective chiefs
of staff, Generals Marshall and Brooke, determined the strategy for the
“second front” in Europe (to relieve Stalin’s in the east). After reading
Roberts, visit the D-Day Museum in Portsmouth to see a replica of the huge
operational wall map that Eisenhower’s staff used in their forward
headquarters at Southwick House, just outside the city. The original was
commissioned from the toy firm Chad Valley to cover the entire coast from
Norway to the Spanish border and arrived in sections so as not to give away
the secret of where exactly the landings would take place.
The map gives a striking impression of just what a huge undertaking Operation
Overlord was. There were gasps of disbelief when the troops received their
briefings, confined behind barbed wire all over southern England. “The
preparations were staggering,” Beevor quotes a New Zealand officer of the
RAF: “The airborne assaults, the quantity and variety of shipping, the
number of army divisions [ten], the tremendous weight of the air offensive.
The scale and precision of it all made our past efforts look insignificant.
When the briefing was over there was no conversation, no laughter. No one
lingered and we filed out as though we were leaving church. Expressions
remained solemn. The task ahead outweighed all our previous experiences and
sent a shiver down the spine.”
The Germans knew it was coming but not precisely where or when. The Allies had
put a huge effort into the deception plan — codename Fortitude — to convince
the defenders that the main assault would come in the Pas de Calais and that
landings in Normandy would therefore be a diversion. Everything from
double-cross spies, false signals traffic to create the impression of an
army waiting in Kent (commanded by Patton), to the “floor plan” of the RAF
and USAAF bombing was co-ordinated by a central office in London to deceive
the Germans, who had fortified the entire Channel coast, with Rommel, who
had been brought back from North Africa after El Alamein, directing the
operations.
Allied reconnaissance of the beaches was not simply a matter of aerial
photography. The public was asked to send in prewar holiday snaps of beaches
from Biarritz to the Baltic but these could not answer questions such as
“will the shingle at (wherever) bear the weight of a tank?”. Omaha beach was
particularly tricky to recce, Sapper Captain Scott-Bowden, and Sergeant
Ogden-Smith of the Royal Marines’ Special Boat Section, swimming ashore each
armed with only a commando knife and a Colt .45 automatic, carrying an 18in
earth augur and a bandolier with containers for their samples. On return,
Scott-Bowden reported to Norfolk House in St James’s Square, where Overlord
was being planned. General Omar Bradley, who would command US troops in the
assault, questioned him painstakingly on the beach-bearing capacity. As he
was leaving Scott-Bowden said: “Sir, I hope you won’t mind my saying it, but
this beach is a very formidable proposition indeed and there are bound to be
tremendous casualties.” Bradley put a hand on his shoulder and said: “I
know, my boy; I know.”
The landing sequences in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan
show pretty well what it was that “Brad” knew.
It is these human touches, as well as the operational detail and the
strategic-level machinations that Beevor excels at — Eisenhower living off
black coffee, cigarettes and paperback westerns in the days leading up to
June 6; the necessary egos of the generals; Churchill “bearing his cross of
Lorraine” (de Gaulle) with a fine mix of flattery and brinksmanship; the
King trumping his Prime Minister’s qualifications to watch the landings from
a warship to persuade Churchill to stay ashore. Beevor deftly handles the
brushes on the great Overlord canvas, though sometimes his assertions make
for a doubting pause in the otherwise compulsive text.
And then there was the weather. The story of the great storm of June 5, the
day originally planned for the landings, is well known but Beevor retells it
well. With clear, sunny skies, and to the bafflement of many, Eisenhower was
persuaded by his chief weather forecaster, Wing Commander Stagg, to postpone
the operation. And then 24 hours later, with rain lashing against the
windows of Southwick House, Stagg persuaded him that the weather would
improve just enough for the landings to go ahead. And it all stemmed from a
favourable report from a weather station at Blacksod Point in Co Mayo. For
vouchsafing secret weather information the Irish might even be forgiven
their neutrality, for never has history turned so much on the predictions of
one man and his met charts.
But why were the Germans caught on the hop? In large measure because the RAF
had such mastery of the skies that no German reconnaissance aircraft could
fly over the Channel and because when the storm blew up the German Navy
assumed that an invasion armada could not sail, and so did not send out
patrols on the night of June 5-6. Nelson’s navy would never have made that
mistake — and the Royal Navy in the Second World War was still imbued with
his spirit. The Germans had an unwavering faith in the infallibility of
systems and procedures: they believed, for example, that their Enigma
machines produced an unbreakable code; so by June 1944 the Allies were
reading almost all their signal traffic.
Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 account, The Longest Day, deals with just
that — the fighting on June 6 itself and the immediate run-up. Beevor’s
account is rather more than it says on the jacket — the battle for Normandy;
it is the story, in large part, of the liberation of France. And he clearly
makes good use of his earlier work Paris After the Liberation.
Inevitably after the nail-biting tension of the days leading up to invasion,
and the drama of the landings themselves, the slog through the Normandy
bocage seems at times . . . a slog. But in those weeks of the stalled
offensive the frayed tempers are interesting to observe. Montgomery,
frustrated that the RAF would not bend to his wishes, called Leigh-Mallory,
the air commander, a “gutless bugger”. In the same breath he sacked one of
his corps commanders, Bucknall, and Bobby Erskine, commander of the 7th
Armoured Division, the famed Desert Rats, who appeared to have lost their
fighting edge, believing that they had done more than their fair share in
North Africa and that it was time for others to take the lead. And also
“Loony” Hinde, commander of 22nd Armoured Brigade. Montgomery himself came
close to being sacked by Eisenhower for “attitude”.
Beevor is harder on the British than the Americans, perhaps because with all
their experience of war to date they should have known better. And it is
significant that the dustjacket shows US troops landing, not British: the
Americans were preponderant on D-Day itself and became ever more so in the
build-up that followed. Indeed, the book is in many ways the classic story
of “young stag, old stag”. But, most important of all, from the author of Stalingrad
and Berlin, the Downfall, is the re-evaluation of the “second front”,
of late seen increasingly as a sideshow to the great events in the east:
“The ferocity of the fighting in northwest France can never be in doubt. And
despite the sneers of Soviet propagandists, the battle for Normandy was
certainly comparable to that of the eastern front.”
Beevor tells it all with the soldier’s eye for what matters on the ground as
much as with the historian’s for the broader understanding of events.
D-Day: The Battle for Normandy by Antony Beevor Viking, £25 608pp Buy
the book
